"…the commonplace shadow does not guarantee visual consistency or permanence, just infinite ambiguity"

On Absurd External Realities in The Invisible Landscape – update

The Invisible Landscape is part of a body of work that has been developed as a result of my exploration of ‘Absurd External Realities’

Photography was once used to examine, explore and capture invisible events within in motion and action, I continue that tradition of exploration by using photography to question that which is still invisible, the density of cast shadows.

The human visual system offers us a very limited window to the world and its with this limited visual system we must create a reality of that world. The same applies to the technical limitations of Photography. My approach in this series is that there not just one window, but many, and therefor an infinite number of visual interpretation possible. In The Invisible Landscape series I am concentrating on external reality of cast shadows in the landscape and I have gone back to the basic questions that Artists have asked for centuries: how dark is the shadow?

This body of work is a reflection of the progress I have made over the last 7 years in exploring cast shadows. And as a result of this work it is my belief that cast shadows can only ever be, in the words of Maurice Merleau-Ponty : ‘objects of imminent visibility’ and like the latent image in a photographic negative they are never quite visible but rather ‘are always in a state of appearing’.

In conclusion the question ’how dark is the shadow’ can never be answered with any certainty and I must accept that there are an infinite number of possible conclusions to the question. All that is left for me to do therefore is to refuse to accept the limitations imposed by technology and the visual system that forces me to see them. All I can do is to continue to learn, to explore, to perceive such ‘objects of imminent visibility’. I find myself in a space confronted by the absurd external reality of ‘the discovery of appearances’ (Konrad Fiedler).